<p>And if the school’s big enough, none of the above may matter much.</p>
<p>Consider the massive University of Maryland at College Park.</p>
<p>It has a substantial commuter population (as might be expected, because it’s located in a highly populated area).</p>
<p>It has a substantial “suitcase” population (as might be expected, since much of the population of Maryland lives within an hour’s drive of the campus, either in the Washington Metro area or in Baltimore and its suburbs).</p>
<p>It has a substantial number of kids who live on campus or in nearby off-campus housing, who center their lives around the campus, and who don’t routinely leave on the weekends.</p>
<p>It has kids who spend as much time as possible in Washington, DC (less than 10 miles away) and don’t center their lives around the campus.</p>
<p>It has a substantial Greek system, but the majority of the students do not go Greek.</p>
<p>Each of these subpopulations includes thousands of people. So no matter what group you belong to, there are plenty of people like you. Does it really matter whether several thousand kids go home on the weekends if there are several thousand others who don’t?</p>